Dating on the Dork Side -- SAMPLE

A Sign of the Apocalypse

I'VE HAD ELEVEN YEARS to think about this (twelve if you count kindergarten), and if you ask me, the first day of school should come with a checklist:

Your best guy friend manages to wear matching socks?

A good sign.

Your homeroom teacher turns out to be a drama king?

Proceed with caution; hilarity may ensue, but so may humiliation.

You find a jock in the tutoring room?

A sign of the apocalypse.

On my last first day of school, I counted the minutes to the final bell, then took the stairs to the tutoring room on the third floor two at a time. I paused at the threshold and sucked in a breath.

The monitors inside the room, at least the ones that I could see, were spotless. I had new pencils sharpened to deadly points. My notebooks were filled with blank pages and promise. Everything was still first-day fresh. Through the open windows came the wondrous sounds of the OlympiaHigh School football team warming up. "O-L-Y-M-P-I-A!" Anything was still possible.

"Switch!" Coach Cutter's voice, amplified by the megaphone, rode the breeze through the windows. The trip seemed to soften all the hard edges, making him sound like someone you might actually want to talk to.

"O-L-Y-M-P-I-A!" the siren song came again. I loved it when jocks spelled. I loved the first day of school. I really, really loved my view of the football field from the windows of the tutoring room.

But Jason "The Ab" Abernathy was ruining all of it.

Jason was one of those A-list jocks you'd hope would only exist in stereotypes, the kind with big muscles, a small brain, and a long list of downtrodden victims. He was captain of the baseball team, but in the fall, he also headed up the Yell Club, probably because it put him up close and personal with the private parts of Olympia High's varsity cheerleaders. Or maybe I was being unfair. Maybe Jason truly had loads of school spirit demanding to be unleashed.

I took in the sight of him in the tutoring room, his tall frame hunched over a computer, typing something with a slow, two finger hunt and peck. Why didn't he just use a smartphone, like everyone else in this century? I thought about leaving. It would be easy to turn around and slink away. But without my skybox view I'd have to hang off the chain link fence and watch football practice like some sort of fangirl. That was dance team/pom squad territory. I was so not pom squad. I was so not dance team, either. Plus, in my ancient jeans, a vintage Star Wars t-shirt, and wrists full of bracelets that had started life as string, I wouldn't exactly blend in.

So I inched into the room. Just in case, I pulled one of those deadly pencils from my book bag.

"Uh, hi," I tried. Tried and, I might add, failed. My voice barely reached my own ears. Except for a muted peck, peck, peck, Jason remained motionless, his eyes still locked on the screen. Outside, the football team moved from stretching to speed drills as I took a few more steps into the room. The newly waxed floor felt slick beneath my Chuck Taylors.

I drew in a breath and said, "Hello?"

Jason jumped. If he'd been going for a fly ball, he would've caught it. Not that we get a lot of those in the tutoring room. My heart rate doubled when he crashed back into his chair, his hands fumbling over the keyboard. That's when he tried it: the screen switch.

I know a few computer geeks (my best friend Rhino, my dad) and I've witnessed more than my fair share of screen switches. One minute, the swimsuit model is there; the next, poof! She's a spreadsheet detailing the mechanical specifications of the Millennium Falcon.

Jason might be a gifted athlete; he might have some amazing batting average, but he couldn't pull off a screen switch to save his life. Whatever he'd been looking at was still on the screen. He went straight into full panic clicking mode, until at last, his finger landed on the computer's power button.

"Don't—" I said.

"Huh?"

Too late. The monitor shimmered and turned black. I sighed. "Never mind."

"Sorry, I was just—" Jason pointed at the screen like I could somehow figure out the rest. Then his expression changed. He lifted one eyebrow and started studying me, like he'd never really seen me before. That might have made sense except he'd sat behind me in homeroom all last year. And the year before that.

"Do you need tutoring?" I asked.

"Do I ... what?"

"Do you need tutoring? Help with schoolwork?" I waved a hand at the computer lab and then the side area with the long tables and individual carrels for studying. "It's what I do."

"That's okay." He pushed back his chair. "I was just leaving."

But when he reached me, he halted, his blue-eyed gaze raining down on the top of my head. I had to crane my neck to look up at him. I wondered where the safer view was. His pecs? Or his face?

"Tutoring," he said, like he was trying out a new word in a foreign language.

Outside of homeroom, I'd never stood this close to Jason before. It was almost like we were having a moment, except he was an A-list jock and I was an A-list ... nothing.

"I might have to try that," he added.

And then, as if the situation wasn't already strange enough, he leaned in closer and inhaled. Deeply. It was almost as if he was sniffing me. Then he was off, charging down the corridor, body slamming the lockers on one side of the hallway, then the other, morphing back into the athlete that half the school loved—and the other half feared.

Author Note: Just wanting to be very clear. This is just a peek at our story. We'll put up a few more scenes but, because of the way we are publishing it, we aren't allowed to give away more than that. Hope you like it!